Led Zeppelin North American Tour 1973
| Concert by Led Zeppelin | |
 |
|
| Associated album | Houses of the Holy |
|---|---|
| Start date | 4 May 1973 |
| End date | 29 July 1973 |
| Legs | 2 |
| No. of shows | 36 |
| Led Zeppelin concert chronology | |
Led Zeppelin's 1973 North American Tour was the ninth concert tour of North America by the English rock band. The tour was divided into two legs, with performances commencing on 4 May and concluding on 29 July 1973. Rehearsals took place at Old Street Film Studios, London.
This tour took place shortly after the release of Led Zeppelin's fifth album, Houses of the Holy, which topped the charts. Prior to its commencement, Led Zeppelin's manager Peter Grant also hired PR consultant Danny Goldberg to further promote the tour, and booked a number of large stadium venues. As a result, this tour broke box office records across America. On May 5 at Tampa Stadium, Florida, they played to 56,800 fans (breaking the record set by The Beatles at Shea Stadium in 1965), and grossed $309,000. In total, this tour grossed over $4,000,000.
On-stage, Led Zeppelin's shows were developed further from those performed on previous tours, with the introduction of dry ice, laser effects, backdrop mirrors, hanging mirror balls and Catherine wheel pyrotechnics. Their dress attire also took on a more flamboyant nature, evidenced in particular by guitarist Jimmy Page's hummingbird jacket and John Paul Jones' Spanish matador jacket. This increase in on-stage theatricality was later referred to by Page during an interview he gave to rock journalist Mick Wall:
Originally, we saw the whole essence of our live performance as something that the audience listened to very carefully, picking up on what was going on, the spontaneity and musicianship. And you can’t do that if you’re running around the stage all night, or at least we couldn’t back then." By 1973, however, "we were much more ambitious, in that respect. We really wanted to take the live performances as far as they could go.
The three sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden in New York City which concluded the tour were filmed for a motion picture, but the theatrical release of this project (The Song Remains the Same) was delayed until 1976. The film documents the theft of $180,000 of the group's money from a safe deposit box at the Drake Hotel in New York, just before their final show. The theft was discovered by Led Zeppelin tour manager Richard Cole, who was immediately interrogated by police as a suspect. The sum of money was the band's takings from their three New York concerts. It was never recovered and the identity of the thief or thieves has never been discovered. The band later sued the Drake Hotel for the theft.
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